As a youth hockey coach for many years, I had the privilege to attend many of NHL Coach Roger Neilson’s coaches’clinics.  (Ten to be exact.)  Roger would always send a Christmas card to every coach who attended his clinic that year, as well as his other contacts.   With as many as 250 coaches attending his clinics, Roger probably had the largest Christmas card list in the entire NHL.  And, with Roger coaching as many as 10 NHL teams, I had a nice collection of greeting cards form NHL teams. As an amateur coach of 25 years at that time, we never had hockey greeting cards to send.  We were lucky if we could find a Currier & Ives card in the store with a few kids playing hockey on a pond.

One afternoon, while watching our Freshman team play, I happened to ask a parent sitting next to me, “...so Mark, what do you do for a living?”
Mark replied, “I’m an illustrator for childrens’ books.”
I said, “Oh boy, we gotta talk.”  I briefly explained my idea for Fan-Attic Greetings.  He invited me to his studio to see his work and that’s literally where it started.

My concept was to have 4 designs in a collection containing 5 cards of each of the four designs with envelopes in a package.  We got to work on the concept for the first 4 cards in the spring of 2001.   The flagship card was ”The Ringer” which you see on our opening page.  The evolution of that card itself was quite an adventure; which I will go into at some time in the near future.  We went on to produce additional collections of 4 cards each in 2002, 2003 and 2004.  The 2016 collection you see within is actually the old 2004 collection.  We plan to release the other three collections in the coming seasons.  So, you’ll always have new cards to send out each season.

The evolution of
 

Fan-Attic Greetings